AI: Flashing Green Lights for AI in 2025. RTZ #791
...entering the 'no holds barred' stage in the AI Tech Wave
We know what ‘flashing red lights’ mean, if their signal is not always followed. Personally or Institutionally. But the opposite is also true.
There are occasionally periods of ‘flashing green lights’, and we at least need to note them while they flash by. And that seems to be what’s happening with the AI Tech Wave, almost three years after OpenAI’s ChatGPT moment. Way past earlier AI Fears of AI Doomerism not so long ago.
Yes, the one that triggered hundreds of billions in annual expenditures (aka investments), in AI Infrastructure, talent, and applications. Up and down the AI Tech Stack.
The signs of these these flashing green lights are everywhere, both institutionally and individually. Let’s discuss some of them now, mid-point through 2025.
Axios does a good job covering the highlights in “AI's anything-goes moment”:
“The artificial intelligence industry is getting nothing but green lights in all directions — now it needs to deliver on its promises.”
“The big picture: AI makers are getting everything they have ever asked for or could possibly want.”
“1. No limits: More money, energy and resources are flowing into the technology's development than any other industry has ever received in such a concentrated time span.”
“Four companies — Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon — expect to spend more than $300 billion this year on AI, while private investors and governments pour hundreds of billions more into AI infrastructure.”
“Public and private projects are rushing to supply the vast energy inputs AI development and use requires.”
“A Pittsburgh summit featuring President Trump last week made clear that the emphasis will be on fossil fuels and nuclear, with little regard for climate concerns or environmental costs.”
“2. No rules: In the second Trump era, the U.S. has dropped any pretense of trying to erect regulatory guardrails around AI.”
“Trump's AI "action plan" coming this week will instead promote speedy deployment to counter China.”
“The "doomer" camp's fear that runaway superintelligence might destroy humanity is no longer even a part of the policy conversation.”
“3. No arguments: Gung-ho CEOs and businesses are pushing AI use on sometimes resistant workforces and a skeptical public, telling hesitaters to get on the AI train or get left behind.”
“The phenomenal popularity of ChatGPT and its competitors suggests there's tons of demand for these tools.”
“But surveys also show the U.S. public fears and distrusts AI and favors a more careful approach to its adoption.”
4. “No doubts: Business leaders and policymakers have successfully sidelined critical questions about harms from AI bias and misuse, privacy violations and appropriation of intellectual property.”
“If you point out that today's AI is inefficient, untrustworthy and unstable, they will say "just wait till next year's model."
“The new technology is being promoted as a race to "superintelligence" where the winner will reap enormous — but unspecified — rewards.”
So No Limits, No Rules, No Arguments and No Doubts.
Regular readers will find plenty of posts here at AI: Reset to Zero discussing all these in a fair amount of detail. Moving fast from ‘AI Fear’ to ‘Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)’. But So What?
“Why it matters: All these green lights are flashing at a critical juncture in the development of AI.”
“Today's large language models are changing at high speed as giant data centers come online, researchers apply new techniques, companies plug the new tools into their workflows and software developers build bridges between AI and the existing digital world.”
“That means AI's formative era is right now — and the technology is developing with almost total freedom.”
“Our thought bubble: AI makers liken the process of training models to raising children. If that's true, the technology is growing up as a fabulously rich kid in a wildly permissive household.”
But this period also means strained arguments to promise results earlier than they may materialize. Again, something I’ve constantly reiterated in these pages.
“Yes, but: Now that the world has said yes to every ask the AI makers have made, it's "put up or shut up" time for the new technology.”
“AI champions predict a utopian cornucopia of benefits just beyond the horizon: Massive boosts to productivity and economic growth! Miracle drugs and cures for cancer! Personalized tutors for every student and Ph.D.-level interns for every company!”
"If we get this right, AI can give everyone more power than ever," Fidji Simo, OpenAI's new CEO of applications, wrote in a blog post Monday — though she also admits that these benefits "won't magically appear on their own."
Wired provides more details on her words here. And I covered the importance of her incoming role as the ‘CEO of Applications’ for OpenAI.
In fact, though, today they remain largely hypothetical, while the technology's costs pile higher.
The bottom line: ChatGPT will hit its three-year anniversary this fall.
Since its arrival, AI leaders have been confidently forecasting that the massive breakthrough of a "singularity"-style superintelligence is a mere year or two away.
This technological event-horizon has remained steadily distant as years have passed. But the industry can't play the "nirvana is just a few years off" card forever.”
These ‘flashing green lights’ are also observed individually, as in the case with Anthropic founder/CEO Dario Amodei, when he spoke up about his concerns over near-term losses of white collar jobs to AI as it moves towards AGI and Superintelligence beyond. A topic I opined about just yesterday.
And he apparently spoke about these flashing lights internally on a different topic at Anthropic, in a Slack memo leaked publicly. In this case it was a line being crossed in working with AI Infrastructure funding in the hundreds of billions from ‘dictators’ in the Mideast, be it from the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and others.
The Wired lays it out in “Leaked Memo: Anthropic CEO Says the Company Will Pursue Gulf State Investments After All”:
“Anthropic is planning to seek investment from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, according to a Slack message CEO Dario Amodei sent to staff Sunday morning, which WIRED obtained.”
“Weighing the pros and cons, Amodei acknowledged in his note that accepting money from Middle East leaders would likely enrich “dictators.” “This is a real downside and I'm not thrilled about it,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.”
The whole piece is worth reading, to get the angst of this founder. Similar no doubt to the eventual angst felt by the two iconic Google founders years after they penned their ‘Don’t Be Evil’ credo for Google in the original 2004 IPO filing.
Companies just like individuals have to go grow up. And decide which end of the spectrum of the Grey Zone they want to be at any point. Real life does not reward binary actions for the most part.
Especially when ultra billionaire egos and ids are unleashed.
Perhaps it’s why the remake of Superman in the theaters this summer feels so anticlimactic.
It clashes with the pure, binary and blind support our younger selves had for Superman in our childhood. Versus the stark realities of the Grey Zones in real life, particularly today.
And tech CEOs who still try to be pragmatic and yet stay closer to the line Superman would choose. Despite all the gnawing AI uncertainties ahead.
The lines are blurring, at moments big and small.
Like when OpenAI this week decided to declare vistory on winning Gold for its latest LLM AI’s performance in the International Math Olympiad for high school students.
But did it without their supervision and permission over the weekend. To beat by a day arch-rival Google, who also won Gold on Monday, but doing it following all the rules like a corporate Boy Scout.
And yes, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has already hired three of the Google AI Researchers who worked on this IMO Gold Medal win. And yes, most of them were from China.
Reportedly DeepSeek from China is not too far behind. Expected to announce any day their winning Gold as well.
At this stage of all green lights flashing, and full on support for all things AI both fundamentally and financially, it may seem naive to raise these questions. But the questions are there nevertheless.
In a period of rapidly ‘flashing green lights’, it all sometimes goes by too fast this AI Tech Wave. Perhaps faster than even Superman.
And that is worth a pause to note. Stay tuned.
(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)